All hands to the capstan!
Forecastle, roundhouse, skiff and jigs and other shipping terms I come to relish and researched their positions on a schooner or galleon.
Cutlasses rasping and aplenty, shipmates. Let to the rigging, men. Coxswain to the tiller. Unfurl the main sail. Cast off, men, cast off!
We need literary adventures, now, more than ever. Lockdown resonances hang heavy in heart and in mind – deserted towns and city centres, are desolate and are haunted by a foggy, engulfing pessimism.
Pigtail tobacco – cut off a quid to knead into the pipe, by thumb and forefinger, shipmate, and the subsequent pipe-reek, bluey-grey and white, mollifying.
To battle the massy, heady buffs of social-media and other technological advances which consume our time, I, at times, head to literature to alleviate the social-world angst.
Reading Treasure Island at forty-one has lifted me out of the humdrum of lockdown melancholy and inertia. It has tossed the naysayers into cauldrons of bubbling pitch.
The accursed band of pirates in Treasure Island are foolish in their outlook for the greedy tenures of easy wealth. To revel in the spoils and trappings which such a bounty brings. (I see the neo-political classes like the brigands and pirates of such a story. Only rooted in spin and arrogance. The vines they swing on which the mediocrity is only too happy to provide. To keep that particular tide of gobshittery flowing.)
There are plenty of images to set the cogs of the brain whirring in admiration –
From Billy Bones laid out on the stone-cold flags of The Admiral Benbow.
Blind Man Pew. The black spot.
Jim Hawkins, plain and true.
Long John Silver – was a good spud, in the end; avuncular to Jim. He hobbles off into the glimmering horizon of the final chapter to literary history. A symbol straddling good and evil if there ever was one.
‘Ho, ho, ho! And a bottle of rum.’
No supplicants here, neigh, neigh. This is a story of autonomy and life and the grievous taking, and, ending of life. Indeed, however, there are ports of authority which are called upon, but, like in all our lives, it’s a fight of survival to the finite dot and exit music for a film – a dish-dash of the hands to finish this consciousness experience for us all. Sure. To echo another Billy, ‘So it goes.’
Ben Gunn’s circumvented madness due to being marooned for three years on the goat-run island; and all he seeks is a piece of cheese. A piece of cheese and us all ordering Amazon packages, daily, to feed our addiction(s) to ‘stuff’.
Peering through a cleft of rock or bird-call from the rooftop canopies of the trees, Robert Louis Stevenson brings us along.
To barrels of salted herring or salted pork. Caskets of rum and brandy.
Stevenson’s dialogue is profane, salty and worldly. The pirates’ cutty jargon – rich and full of rum and poetry to ‘em who hears it.
Or they’d hang from the gibbets those who tells it, shipmate.
Treasure – gold sovereigns, some seven-hundred thousands worth. I had envisaged the treasure as a mariner’s broad night sky and starlight pinpointed with a vast hoard of riches including: topazes, opals diamonds, rubies the shades of vermilion and russet, twinkling gold, emerald haze and powdered cinnabar.
Israel Hands’ watery grave on the clean bottom’d sand bobbing along with ‘Irelander, O’Brien’ his drenched red-cap, washed ashore.
The sea is no fair, maiden, shipmate. Salty-spray, barnacles clamped to star-side or port. Rollers booming in on shore, the retreating foamy waves to run again…
I’ll always be in love with adventure – throughout my life, I have – man and boy.
If I was without books, I’d rather have a vat of boiling, liquid gold poured down my throat and explode in my gullet.
I would have to rate Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson: a fat of the land ten out of ten. An exceptional read/experience.
‘Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!’ SQUAWK!
N.
mindmuesli 